From the moment we came together five years ago to build a community for women, it’s been a core objective of ours to advance the careers of all women — including women of all races. In particular, we’ve tried to support women of color and include intersectional experiences in our content, VIP contributor group, role model profiles, webinars, podcasts and at our annual summit, Galvanize. In our line of work, we often encounter companies who want to be more diverse but worry about being transparent. Our counsel is that nobody is perfect. While they have taken the first step by acknowledging shortcomings, we then encourage them to take additional, concrete actions. This is also true for us. We believe we can and should do better as a company. We’re encouraged by the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, and that it is getting overdue, international attention. We are committed to using this moment to publicly commit to taking more action. In particular, we acknowledge that our own, albeit small, employee base is not diverse enough. We should improve our internal recruiting policies and be more systematic in setting diverse representation metrics within our marketing and content-creation processes. To that end, we are creating a new Diversity & Inclusion plan for our business. It covers actions such as: 1) Sharing our metrics publicly: By month’s end, we will anonymously survey our employees and publish our colleagues’ demographic data by race, gender, sexual orientation, ability and other diversity dimensions, including a breakdown of the leadership team vs. total employee base**; 2) Revising our recruiting and hiring policies to ensure diverse candidate slates and set concrete, measurable goals for improving our company’s internal diversity data; 3) Creating a new content creation process that incorporates representation standards that covers images, editorial sources and role model profile backgrounds on our platform; and 4) Setting performance metrics for employees so there is accountability and consequences for these diversity goals. We believe one of the most important things we can do right now is listen to marginalized, under-represented voices in our community. We welcome you — our supportive and diverse community — to send us your suggestions and ideas about how we can improve this platform. You can add them in the comments or email us at [email protected] As Bozoma Saint John expressed at our Galvanize event last year, women will not achieve equality until black women do. We could not agree more. - Georgene and Romy (co-founders of Fairygodboss) ** Update: our first employee demographic survey is available here: https://fairygodboss.com/articles/2020-fairygodboss-employee-demographics